The Patrician eBook

The Duchess of Gloucester’s Ball, a function
which no one could very well miss, had been fixed
for this late date owing to the Duchess’s announced
desire to prolong the season and so help the hackney
cabmen; and though everybody sympathized, it had been
felt by most that it would be simpler to go away,
motor up on the day of the Ball, and motor down again
on the following morning. And throughout the
week by which the season was thus prolonged, in long
rows at the railway stations, and on their stands,
the hackney cabmen, unconscious of what was being
done for them, waited, patient as their horses.
But since everybody was making this special effort,
an exceptionally large, exclusive, and brilliant company
reassembled at Gloucester House.

In the vast ballroom over the medley of entwined revolving
couples, punkahs had been fixed, to clear and freshen
the languid air, and these huge fans, moving with
incredible slowness, drove a faint refreshing draught
down over the sea of white shirt-fronts and bare necks,
and freed the scent from innumerable flowers.

Late in the evening, close by one of the great clumps
of bloom, a very pretty woman stood talking to Bertie
Caradoc. She was his cousin, Lily Malvezin,
sister of Geoffrey Winlow, and wife of a Liberal peer,
a charming creature, whose pink cheeks, bright eyes,
quick lips, and rounded figure, endowed her with the
prettiest air of animation. And while she spoke
she kept stealing sly glances at her partner, trying
as it were to pierce the armour of that self-contained
young man.

For the girl had come gliding by, her eyes wandering
lazily, her lips just parted; her neck, hardly less
pale than her white frock; her face pale, and marked
with languor, under the heavy coil of her tawny hair;
and her swaying body seeming with each turn of the
waltz to be caught by the arms of her partner from
out of a swoon.

With that immobility of lips, learned by all imprisoned
in Society, Lily Malvezin murmured:

“Who’s that she’s dancing with?
Is it the dark horse, Bertie?”

Through lips no less immobile Bertie answered:

“Forty to one, no takers.”

But those inquisitive bright eyes still followed Barbara,
drifting in the dance, like a great waterlily caught
in the swirl of a mill pool; and the thought passed
through that pretty head:

“She’s hooked him. It’s naughty
of Babs, really!” And then she saw leaning against
a pillar another whose eyes also were following those
two; and she thought: “H’m!
Poor Claud—­no wonder he’s looking
like that. Oh! Babs!”

By one of the statues on the terrace Barbara and her
partner stood, where trees, disfigured by no gaudy
lanterns, offered the refreshment of their darkness
and serenity.